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Thursday, September 19, 2013

The most dangerous hacker group: Hidden Lynx

The Chinese hacker group, Hidden Lynx, is the most skilled, experienced and dangerous active hacker group today as shown in a recent analysis by Symantec Security Response.

Symantec Security Response has collected and analyzed the data of all the most active hacker groups in the world. The analysis showed that the Chinese hacker group, known as Hidden Lynx, is by far the most potent, skilled and dangerous at the moment. The report shows that the group is composed of 50 to 100 individuals with main targets being multi-national corporations and government agencies over the whole globe.

Hidden Lynx differs from other hacker groups in the members possess extremely good technical skills, furthermore, the group is very well organized and has access to significant amounts of technical as well as economical resources. These attributes coupled with the patience of the group to penetrate targets make Hidden Lynx a very potent danger.

In the recent analysis, Hidden Lynx is also denoted to be pioneers in the hacking technique known as watering hole. Briefly the technique of watering hole involves infecting popular legit websites with malicious code. These websites are not chosen at random, and instead the websites are chosen based on the probability that the victim or victims will visit the website. This is a very indirect method to attack an organization with tons of obvious collateral damage, however, the technique is extremely potent as it is difficult to be fully protected from behind even corporate firewalls. In addition, Hidden Lynx also has very early access to 0-day exploits and their organization skills and resources allow them to attack various parts of a delivery chain in order to reach their final target.

For example, Hidden Lynx is known to infect computers at the factory, and then waiting for them to be delivered to their final target, something which obviously requires a great deal of patience and resources. These unique attributes, however, also is the reason why Hidden Lynx is considered to be the most dangerous organized threat on the internet today.

While it could be tempting to believe that Hidden Lynx is associated with the Chinese government, this is apparently not at all clear in this case. Instead, Hidden Lynx is described as a group of individuals who hack for profit. This means that, provided enough funds, anyone with the right contacts can hire this group to perform their dirty work.